Best con­tri­bu­tion to soci­ety

The monthly Repair Cafe at Ngaio Uni­on Church.  How cool to have a big room full of incred­ibly com­pet­ent humans ded­ic­ated to help­ing oth­ers for free (you can con­trib­ute koha and if you don’t have coins, ask them for their bank account num­ber). I took a record play­er and was not con­des­cen­ded to at all when it was dis­covered it has­n’t worked for ten years because of a rogue cue but­ton. Lovely Andrew also showed me the pack­aging of a switch to go to Mitre 10 to buy so he could fix my lamp too. Hero.

andrew's hand screwing a switch

There were oth­ers there with sew­ing machines, and fix­ing fur­niture, and bike repairs hap­pen­ing out­side. You’re wel­comed in and told to grab a cuppa and some­thing to eat while you wait to be called (the bak­ing looked really good but I was wear­ing a face mask). It appears a bunch of people just come in to chat and get human inter­ac­tion, which is lovely too. There’s very sol­id seats, and an area set up for kids to col­our and play. It was a little hec­tic so you may want to take some­thing to read and/or noise can­cel­ling head­phones if you’re likely to find that a bit dif­fi­cult, but the people could not have been more lovely.

I will just also add that as a queer per­son, see­ing how some “Chris­ti­an” churches have been weapon­ising hate lately,  it was a lovely remind­er that actu­ally, some Chris­ti­ans really are there to make their com­munit­ies bet­ter places, one broken lamp at a time.

The repair cafe hap­pens every third Sat­urday of the month, and if you’ve got any­thing you need help with, I really recom­mend head­ing along.

Best decision that seemed unfair at the time: 

K‑Zone karaoke on Wake­field Street does not sell soju. Sunday was prob­ably all the bet­ter for not being able to buy it on Sat­urday night.

Also hot tip: for K‑Zone – they DO have a butt­load of Bey­on­cé songs, but you have to search for them under “full name” rather than “first name”. Ask the staff if you’re still hav­ing trouble – we were not the first to have this prob­lem.

Best new­ish bakery

Uncle Leo’s in Evans Bay. Abso­lutely stun­ning apple cronuts, good cof­fee (and it’s harder to get right with decaf!), lovely staff. The apple & sage pork saus­age roll was also really good too but it would prob­ably have been nicer at the start of the day rather than at 2pm after sit­ting in a heated cab­in­et for many hours.

Best con­trib­ut­ing mem­ber of the Wel­ling­tonista (this week)

Me cos I’m the only one that stumped up with con­tri­bu­tions.